The crowning achievement of FOSS is in convincing maintainers to accept exploitation as beneficial.
The FOSS era can be distinguished from the BSD/MIT era preceding it by its dedicated promotion of libertarianism in all shared source code conversations, which celebrates (quite defensively!) the resulting exploitation and free-riding as beneficial. While this is often presented as a natural outcome of BSD/MIT licensing, that FOSS viewpoint hinges on assumption-by-framing of exploitation without compensation as being morally neutral or positive. That framed assumption is false: the “scientists publish their work to each other” social climate that preceded it was openly hostile to entities who profited from work without ‘uploading’ via publication back to the community in return. Thus, the innovative social bargain of the GPL: you receive legal certainty that improvements to your source code will be shared back to you; then, FOSS advocacy uses adoption of the GPL as proof that exploitation without compensation is beneficial.
pabs3
The GPL requires sharing forward, not sharing back.
KingMob
Yes, that's the problem.
pabs3
No, its the solution to the world wanting to reduce software freedom.
The FOSS era can be distinguished from the BSD/MIT era preceding it by its dedicated promotion of libertarianism in all shared source code conversations, which celebrates (quite defensively!) the resulting exploitation and free-riding as beneficial. While this is often presented as a natural outcome of BSD/MIT licensing, that FOSS viewpoint hinges on assumption-by-framing of exploitation without compensation as being morally neutral or positive. That framed assumption is false: the “scientists publish their work to each other” social climate that preceded it was openly hostile to entities who profited from work without ‘uploading’ via publication back to the community in return. Thus, the innovative social bargain of the GPL: you receive legal certainty that improvements to your source code will be shared back to you; then, FOSS advocacy uses adoption of the GPL as proof that exploitation without compensation is beneficial.